Wednesday, 4 April 2012

#twitterangelus

As Joseph Shaw pointed out in my comments yesterday, and as I have had occasion to remark before, Twitter is not the place for reasoned argument or discussion of any subtlety.

However, perhaps surprisingly, it can be a place of prayer.

Yesterday, I was about to end a few minutes time-wasting on Twitter to get on with some more important things (that's not a very big claim...) when I noticed it was mid-day. On a whim - or prompted by my Guardian Angel - I tweeted (@ nobody, just into the ether) the first line of the Angelus, in Latin.

To my surprise and delight I got an instant response, in Latin, from @sitsio. We completed the Angelus in traditional antiphonal fashion, and I left Twitter and got on with other things.

Later that day I was on Twitter again (well, it is the holidays, he pleaded in weak self-defence) when @PartTimePilgrim asked if @sitsio was going to lead the Angelus at 6.00 pm. Somebody had noticed - and not only that, thought it a good enough idea to repeat. The vote was for English that time, and we were joined by several more people, including @AmandaMoll who retweeted the proceedings from a traffic jam on the M25.

So if you are online at midday or 6pm (UK time) look for the #twitterangelus hashtag and join in. If you are up at 6am, you could lead it then!

If you are in a different timezone (colonial press please copy) you could start it there at the appropriate time.

(Hint: it's probably easiest to have typed it out in advance, and copy, paste and send).

There's plenty of acrimony on Twitter, not least with regard to Catholicism: let's inject some prayer there too, and allow the Holy Spirit to renew the face of the earth.

About Me

Secretive (eg my wife doesn't know I'm writing this blog)
Mendacious (eg my name isn't really Ben Trovato - that comes from an Italian saying: Se non è vero, è molto ben trovato - if it's not true, it's well found (or made up, as we'd say.))
Superficial (I have an interest in almost everything, and can pass myself off as knowing a lot more than I do...)
Self-deluding (my wife probably does know about this blog by now...)
For the record, my kids aren't really called Antonia, Bernadette, Charlie and Dominique either... It would seem unfair to write about them under their true names, so ABCD seemed a good idea. My wife's not Anna either, but again the AB pattern seemed pleasing.